The city lights were scattered below the lookout like scattered diamonds. I remember thinking that if I could get off the hood and run, if I could make my legs respond…
“She grabbed my jaw.” My hand moves before I can stop it, fingers pressing against my own face in the ghost of someone else’s grip. “Like this. And she tilted my head back, and she smiled at me, and she said—” I have to stop to swallow. The memory of her voice is the worst part, the part that surfaces at three in the morning when the hunger wakes me, and the dark feels hostile. “She said, ‘I have plans for you, little scion.’”
The room is absolutely silent.
I don’t look at Rogue.
I can’t.
Because I know what his expression looks like when he’s working very hard to keep it still, and I don’t have the emotional balance right now to look at that and keep talking.
“She bit me.” The words land flatly. “Drained me, not quickly, slowly. Like she was taking exactly the amount she intended, not a drop more. And the whole time I was losing consciousness, she was watching me. Watching my face. She fucking enjoyed it.” Something cold moves through my chest at the recollection. “Not the way a monster enjoys it, not mindlessly, she was clinical about it. Like I was an experiment she was running and the results were satisfying. I… I thought I was dying,” I say, and the simplicity of those five words carries more weight thanI can dress them in anything else. “Iwasdying. I felt myself going under, and then she pried my mouth open, and she made me drink her fucking blood, and the last thing I heard before everything went dark was her voice…” I pause. “Saying I was going to be very useful.”
The silence holds, and I finally have the willpower to glance at Rogue.
He gives me a small but somehow powerful head nod, and it is all the encouragement I need to keep going.
Rolling my shoulders, I stand taller. “I woke up in a warehouse…” I continue, because stopping now would be worse than continuing, because the only way through this tunnel is forward, “… alone. And I didn’t know what I was, what had happened, or why everything was so…” a small hiss escapes through my teeth, “… loud. Bright. Everything was too much. The dark felt full of things I could see clearly, and I didn’t understand why. And the hunger was—”
A low growl inadvertently erupts from my throat. Everyone tenses, which only makes me feel more anxious about all of this.How do you explain the hunger to people who have never experienced anything adjacent to it?
“It was like drowning,” I say carefully. “But the thing you were drowning in was need. Like your whole body became one single enormous want and there was no edge to it, no ceiling, nothing to measure it against.”
My jaw tightens. “I was stumbling around aimlessly until I found a diner. I was trying to find… I don’t even know what I was trying to find. People… normalcy, something that made sense. And there was a waitress, and she cut her finger on something behind the counter, and…” I stop. The ember-glow along Scorch’s forearms brightens, barely perceptibly, but I see it. “And I lost control,” I say, and I make myself say it plainly, without softening it, because these people deserve theunvarnished version, and I deserve to say it out loud instead of letting it live in the dark part of my chest where it’s been eating me for three weeks.
“She died. I didn’t know what I was doing until it was already done, and then I was standing there with…” My hands are not entirely steady. I notice this the way you do a small, unavoidable fact. “With blood on my hands, and then I ran. Because I didn’t know what else to do, and after that, I fed and killed another three people, only making me more frantic and desperate until somehow, I ended up at the gates here, and then…” I shift my gaze to him, “… Rogue found me.” I stop talking.
The quiet that follows is the kind that has weight to it, the kind that presses down on your shoulders and makes the air feel thick. Scorch’s expression is unreadable, and that’s almost worse than hostility. Dread stands like a monument, his presence pressing against the edges of my awareness with that low-grade alarm that is his particular gift. Hades is perfectly, unnervingly still.
And Crave stands at the center of it all, his silver-dark eyes moving over me with the measured attention of someone filing away information that has had centuries to develop its methodology. He says nothing, and somehow that’s the most demanding silence in the room.
“She knewexactlywhat she was doing,” I say, because the detail is nagging at me, the thing that doesn’t resolve itself no matter how I turn it over. “It wasn’t random. She found me deliberately. She had a plan for me, she said so herself. And I’ve spent three weeks not understanding what that plan was because why would someone ancient, powerful, and clearly capable of building an army want a twenty-three-year-old human woman who worked in a coffee shop and had questionable taste in lookout h-hookups?” My voice cracks slightly on the last word, and I let it, because there’s only somuch steadiness available and I’ve been spending it carefully. “Why me? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Sloane stands very still, and the burning-iron smell that clings to her has intensified, deepening and sharpening at the edges, the way it does when her power is working at something beneath the surface. Her eyes find mine, and then they find Rogue beside me, and something moves through her expression that looks very much like understanding arriving at a conclusion it didn’t particularly want to reach.
“Charlie…” Her voice is careful, the voice of someone placing their words very precisely because the thing they’re handling is fragile and dangerous in equal measure. “You said she chose you specifically. Sought you out. Used a witch to find the link first.”
“That’s what Crave told the club.” I glance toward Rogue, who stands at my side with his jaw set and his golden eyes moving between Sloane and me. “I don’t know what link she found.”
“You are Rogue’s fated mate,” Sloane says quietly, and the room absorbs those words in the kind of silence that follows a thunderclap. “She wasn’t testing whether a random newborn could be a weapon. She was testing whether his fated mate could be a weapon. Someone she could use to fracture his loyalty to Crave… his Bloodguard oath.”
Her eyes find mine, and in them there is something that is genuinely, uncomplicatedly sad. “You weren’t an accident, Charlie. You were chosen because of exactly who you are to him. She knew Rogue would protect you. She knew it would cost him.”
The understanding arrives not gradually but all at once, a complete and devastating picture assembling itself in a single instant.
Valeria didn’t turn me because she wanted a weapon she could control. She turned me because she wanted a fracture. A splinter driven between Rogue and his president, his oath, hisbrotherhood, wedged in deep enough that it would crack the whole structure from the inside out. And I had been the perfect instrument for it because I was the one thing in the world that would make Rogue choose instinct over duty.
Wolf over oath.
Mate over club.
Rogue’s arms slide around me, his front pressing firmly against my back as he holds me to him, clearly sensing I need his comfort right now.
The weeks of patience and sacrifice. The nights he sat across from me in the dark and talked me down from the edge of my own hunger while the Bloodguard connection he’d built his entire adult life frayed strand by strand in silence.
All of it, by design.
All of it,herplan.
